Should Flickr Stick To Photo-sharing?

Disclaimer: I’m founder and CEO of pxCream (www.pxcream.com)

In the past month (years?) Flickr has been focusing on the biggest part of its community; happy dudes with a point and shot camera (in other words; not pro photographers, not even semi-pro but “Average Joe” who takes pictures at his kid’s birthday).

- It is obvious when you look at Flickr’s ergonomic and design. Flickr does not give value to pictures (they are small, and lost in a middle of a forest of controls, comments, groups and others options) but rather develops an active community (posting comments, creating groups, using sharing options…).

- It is also visible when Yahoo! decided to merge Flickr with Yahoo! Photos. Yahoo! Photos was a huge collection of holidays/birthdays/party pictures. Adding those pictures to the Flickr catalogue was clearly saying no to quality (and yes to quantity and $$).

- Flickr does not provide protection services (watermark, embedded copyright metadata…) for their users pictures. So pro photographers often see their pictures stolen from their Flickr’s accounts and re-used somewhere else.

- Flickr does not really care about artistic sense or even photojournalism and often censure content (and delete pictures) without enquiring.

- Even if they are far from being pro photographers, those “Average Joe” users have “pro” accounts. Simply because it’s cheap, unlocks the usage restriction and it looks cool to have a “pro” tag next to your name (everybody would like to see their pictures considered as “pro photographer” level…).

So they pay the fee, and they are more willing to print pictures than pro / semi-pro, and the cherry on the cake is that they use little bandwidth (only family and friends are viewing the pictures). And of course they will love the new video option.

In a nutshell, Flickr loves them because they generate a lot of income.

And it’s not a niche of 10000+ users that will make Flickr change its mind. Simply because 10000 or even 50000 users have close to no weight against the 6-8+ millions of total users Flickr probably has.

If Flickr is smart (I believe they are ;-)) they will add the option to allow users to hide videos from browsed content. That will make most of the “renegades” happy. But they won’t withdraw videos from Flickr and they won’t stick to photo sharing only, simply because they want (must) generate more and more income.

That was my 2 cents

Thomas Hawk (CEO of Zooomr (www.zooomr.com)) has some interesting words on the topic. Check out his blog if you’re interested: http://thomashawk.com

Interesting points made by the poster above me. My personal opinion is that Flickr should just stick to the photos, they have been succeeding. There are plenty of other sites that offer video sharing along with photos already. I haven’t tried pxcream yet, but have been exploring others and am most happy with Pixamo thus far.

I’m a longtime Flickr user and I must say… I like what they are doing with videos.

I am a Flickr PRO account user and other than the 90 second time limit, i’m happy with the direction they are going in with the videos and how they are integrating them into the site. They blend in perfectly side by side with the photos and don’t look out of place.

One of the main reasons why I like it so much is I can have all my photos and videos in one place. These could be travel photos and videos, or family photos and videos (using the family/friends privacy feature to restrict access).

I already used Flickr to make my photos available to family, friends, and the public but I had refrained from making videos available to family and friends because I didn’t want to put them up on YouTube and I didn’t want to have another site to go to in order to manage this content. Lets face it personal photos and videos are quite similar in how you handle them, with the exception of prints of course. But when you travel… you take photos and video. When your kid has a birthday… you take photos and video. Flickr makes it easy to make these available to whoever you want in a simple to use fashion.

The fact that it is limited to only Flickr PRO users makes it even better. It means only people a little more serious with their videos will be uploading them and you won’t get as much useless crap as you do on YouTube which is about 80% crap and 20% worthwhile.

I think the first poster is a bit mistaken at Flickr’s target audience… it isn’t really pro photographers. If you are a pro I would suggest you explore using SmugMug. Flickr is a consumer product and isn’t targeted specifically at the pro shooters.

@Carl: Agree with most of your comment.
However you said “I think the first poster is a bit mistaken at Flickr’s target audience… it isn’t really pro photographers.” -> That was exactly my point. Flickr’s target audience is NOT pro photographers.
SmugMug, Zooomr… and soon pxCream (I hope ;)) are better alternative.

I don’t think Flickr was ever intended to satisfy the pro photographer community. It was designed to give everyone the ability to easily share photos with family, friends and others, and also allow for interaction about the photography. It wasn’t intended to allow users to profit from their photography, as Professionals would want to do. There are other services out there for that.

The “Pro” accounts aren’t even designed for Professionals, but rather those who take more photos than the average user. There are no features with a Pro account that are actually considered a professional upgrade compared to the free account.

The thing is, though, that many of the millions of people who use Flickr, also take short video clips with their point-and-click cameras. Now, those users can have one place to share both their personal photos and videos with others.

To those who don’t want it… you don’t have to use it.

Hey there Carl. Always good to see you weighing in on the photo services.

The biggest problem for the users, I think is two-fold. One, they can’t opt out of seeing the videos if they don’t want them to pop up in search results and sets. No one likes having something forced on them that they don’t want or need. The second is that the rollout added TREMENDOUS drag to the site. I was on Flickr when it launched just adding a couple of contacts and *I* noticed it. Imagine if I was a power user with a Pro account actually doing anything. I’d be furious.

And again, this is nothing new. Kodak Gallery has allowed you to upload any of the short videos you could take with your digital camera. With no 90-second limit and no exclusion to paid accounts.

The “No Video on flickr” movement is not (well, not entirely) a bunch of Luddites whining about moving pictures. The flickr corporate strategy is a desperate short-term attempt by parent company Yahoo to add value before an impending corporate take-over.

Adding video to flickr is a horrible move for the brand, for the long-term health of flickr, and for the user community. flickr management is diluting the brand identity, introducing “New Coke” at the expense of “Classic Coke.” This wil not help the Yahoo bargaining position, and even foolishly endangers Yahoo employee stock options.

Nothing keeps flickr from introducing a separate video service except the desire to exploit flickr community user numbers for short-term gain in the corporate wars.

flickr community members have a strong interest in a strong flickr brand identity. This move weakens it.

Flickr is now hiding the amount of photos tagged with ”novideo” it started as a form of protest to become an all time tag in the explore page.

some users are now deleting their accounts because of the response by Flickr team.

in one of the videos from the manager of Flickr everyone from the Flickr Headquarter’s office posted in one of the most difficult times for us members they where shouting loud all together and at the same time we are getting computer generated replies only to our emails concerning what is happening.

Flickr will never be as good as youtube why don’t they keep it for photos only, over 25,000 members agree with it.